


Collision

by doomedship



Category: The Good Doctor (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:34:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23703172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doomedship/pseuds/doomedship
Summary: Neil tries to resist the inevitable. Neil/Claire, squaring off against reality.
Relationships: Claire Browne/Neil Melendez
Comments: 36
Kudos: 153





	Collision

**Author's Note:**

> I started this as a fic doodle based on one random line that popped into my head, "just because I want you doesn't mean I can have you", which I strongly believe is the mood we *should* be seeing Melendez go through in season 4. Then it grew legs and this is what happened after some sleeplessness.
> 
> Plus, I wanted to try write more Melendez POV since I rarely seem to, and also Claire's more fiery side.

1\. 

He catches her watching him, through the glass in his office, green eyes searching and a little hostile. 

He's got Audrey in there, she's standing a bit too close. Just a business call, but she doesn't know that. He knows how it looks.

He can see the little fire in her eyes before she shuts her computer, gets her bag and leaves the room, and he files that look away, preserving it for the next time he needs to feel the blood pound through his veins. 

He loves it when she's fierce.

He shifts from his perch on the edge of his desk, puts it between him and Audrey, cocks his head and says whatever it is she needs him to say so she can leave. 

As soon as she does, he gets up too, picks up his jacket and beelines for the locker room. Catches the door just as she's on her way out, and stands there in the doorway so she almost walks right into him.

She gives him a wary, angry, hungry look as she steps back and it's like every flash of those eyes sets a little bit more of him alight. 

"You know she's my boss, right? Sometimes she has to talk to me," he says, low voice, a slight smile lifting the edge of his mouth. 

Her eyes flash again; he hides the way it feels like hot ice shooting down his spine.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she says, defiant, unwilling to give an inch. He admires her stubborn pride, never acknowledging what they both already know. 

He tilts his head, still blocking the door. "What are you doing tonight?" 

"Seeing Dash," she says, and that answer comes a little quick, it's a little too convenient. The smirk doesn't shift from his face. 

"Good for you," he says, and he sees the flicker of annoyance, of frustration, of what she wants warring with what she believes she can have. He steps aside. 

She inhales deeply and brushes by him, and when he catches the subtle, sweet scent of her passing him by his fingers itch to catch her wrist, her hand, to pull her flush against him and stop this war of attrition. 

"Did you figure out if he's the right guy?" he asks, casually, and she freezes. She half-looks back over her shoulder and says nothing, a storm brewing in her gaze.

He breathes out slowly and wonders if this is what it's like to burn alive. 

2\. 

It gets harder to resist over time, not easier. 

He debates with himself daily about whether he should cut himself off, like some kind of drug addict, before he really does go too far down this path.

But it's too late, he thinks. Cutting her off from him would be like chewing off his own leg; it's just not something he actually thinks he can do. Not when her just standing there in a white coat, passionate about her case and arguing with him, like usual, has him struggling to keep himself standing behind his own desk and away from her. 

Even when, and maybe especially when, she's pissed at him, he wants to drown himself in her touch. 

"God- can you just-" her patience wears through to breaking point at his continued silence, assuming his unresponsiveness is his intransigence and not her driving him to distraction. Her fierce eyes burn into him and he finally takes a few steps towards her, hands on hips, some primal part of him screaming at him to _do_ something. 

"Why are we always fighting, now?" she says, voice tight with frustration. He looks at her, his head tilted expectantly, and she fidgets under that look, because he knows she knows the reason just as well as he does. 

"Because we can't do anything else about this," he says lowly, and then it gets interesting. 

Up until now neither of them has said a word to acknowledge the tension, the rapidly accelerating cascade of sparks between them, like letting the house catch fire while they keep on living in it. It's the point of no return, but he has had enough. 

"What do you mean, 'this'?" she asks, bold and challenging and just a hint of sweetness and all the rest of the things that make him want her like he's never wanted anyone else before.

"I want you," he admits aloud, for the very first time. Her eyes don't grow wide, don't give away surprise, but he can see the sudden blaze behind them, the intensity of that moment etched into the darkening shade of green. She exhales.

"But the fact that I want you doesn't mean I can have you," he says, the corner of his mouth twisting up as he looks at her, a mix of bitterness and affection in the way he smiles.

"I know," she says. She drops the hostility, whatever they were arguing over tossed aside and forgotten in the wake of what's just changed in the air between them. She breathes out slowly and takes a few steps forward. Lust makes her bold, and she lingers, standing just that bit closer than she usually dares to, her lips only inches from his as she looks up at him. Her eyes drop to where the pulse must be jumping in his throat and he swallows, hard. She smiles.

"Let's try this again tomorrow."

She means the case they're working on; he thinks maybe she also means this tantalising dance of back and forth that's slowly killing him. 

She holds his gaze fearlessly until at last she turns on her heel and leaves. 

He grips the edge of his desk and pinches the bridge of his nose.

He'll fight this for her sake but he's starting to think there's only one way this can end and it's not an ending where he gets to keep the moral high ground. 

3\. 

They're at another gala, dressed up to the nines, and he swears that God is testing him. Or, he would, if he didn't know how deliberate this all was. 

She's wearing vivid green and she looks like something straight out of a wet dream. Queens and gods have nothing on her, and sure as hell, she knows it and she means it. She's confident and unashamed, and every time she moves she takes his eye with her. 

The only small mercy is that he's not the only person there that night who can't stop staring at her. She's turning heads wherever she walks and he might have been annoyed by that if it didn't make his inability to stop looking at her a little less obvious. 

But he's not as subtle as he thinks and halfway through the night she's talking to some slick board member from Seattle and he just wants to know what it is he said that's making her laugh like that. 

And he's not paying any attention to a word Dr Andrews is saying. 

"Something going on that I should know about?" Andrews says, twirling his champagne flute calculatingly. Neil jerks his attention back to him. 

"What?" he says, irritably. There's a knowing look in Andrews's face and he doesn't like it. 

"I've seen that look before," Andrews says, draining his glass and depositing it with a passing waiter. "It's the same look I gave my wife before she ever agreed to go out with me."

He almost chokes on his own champagne then, and he can only stare at Andrews like an idiot with nothing to say. He's defenceless, because there is no defence against the obvious truth. 

Andrews shakes his head. "Be careful," he says, and Neil knows the warning is serious. "Because you can't go there. Not while she's-"

"I know," he snaps, tired of being told what everyone already knows. She is off limits, and he is screwed. 

He looks over at her again and feels unbidden relief to see she's walking always from Seattle in his designer tux. She looks up and meets his gaze and the slow, knowing smile she gives him is a turn on he can't explain any more than he can deny it. 

He waits for Andrews to disappear, to get caught up with some Silicon Valley billionaire whose money is more interesting than policing him, before finally he dares approach her for the first time that night. 

She looks up at him from under dark lashes, and she could almost be soft and innocent in that moment but he already knows that that's not true; she knows full well how that look makes him want to drop to his knees and beg.

"Enjoying the party?" he says, trying for levity, and she inclines her head, still with that knowing smile. 

"Come with me for some air?" she says, and he should say no, should remind her who they are and where this is, but instead his feet walk right after her like he's under a spell.

All he can think about is how that green silk would feel sliding all the way up her thighs.

He stands with her on some secluded balcony, and searches her face for a clue as to what she's thinking, but her half-lidded eyes remain a sparkling mystery as she leans over the rail and watches the motion below.

He stands beside her and watches her.

"You look beautiful," he says, because it seems impossible in that moment not to speak such an undeniable truth. She pauses, eyes down at first, and then cautiously, slowly, she looks up at him. 

Then, all at once, her hand is on his wrist, pulling him away from the railing and then she's standing on her toes, one arm around his neck and the other on his cheek, and he draws in his breath in the heartbeat before her lips press against his.

He could never have stopped that moment in a million years, even if for some unfathomable reason he wanted to. 

Her eyes are wide and unguarded when she draws back, her lipstick smudged and her breathing not steady. It's the first time in a long time he's seen her with her defences down and it drives him crazy that he'll have to let her put them straight back up and pull away.

"That was a one-off," she says breathily. "Blame the champagne."

"Better make it twice-off, then," he mutters, and he kisses her again before he can come to his senses, something deeply buried in his chest roaring in triumph as her lips curve into a smile against his and she kisses him back with all the fire he keeps seeing in her flashing eyes. 

And they won't speak of this again, but he'll think of it often, and he'll remember how the silk of her hip feels underneath his fingertips for the rest of his life.

  
4\. 

They go back to some kind of normal, after that night on the balcony. He doesn't know how she does it but she's the picture of nonchalance at work, cool and collected when they're with everybody else and there's a job to do. She's mechanically pristine in the OR, scrupulously polite outside it, and nobody seems any the wiser. 

It drives him up the wall that she can be so in control when he feels like he's about to lose the last of his. 

He wonders for a while if she's decided to let it go, to move past him and find something that makes more sense, and he admits it leaves a bitter taste in his mouth to think of that. 

But it's not like he can do anything about it. 

He starts working later, writing articles and submissions for conferences he's only partly interested in attending.

He thinks if he can throw himself far enough into his work he might just get over this thing that's somehow turned him from a rising star in the field to a lovesick teenager again. When in doubt, go back to what he does best.

He gets a last minute invite to a surgical conference in Austin in a few weeks' time and keenly accepts. Just him, a luxury hotel and nothing but Texans to worry about for a few days. Audrey approves the time out on the condition that he actually networks and doesn't just raid the minibar on the hospital's dollar, and Aoki waves the funding through. 

So he books flights and tries not to think about what he's running from.

Then two days later she hovers outside his office, hands in her pockets, and his mouth is dry as he motions her to enter. 

So sue him if three different fantasies about getting her alone in his office spring to the front of his traitorous mind. 

"I'm coming to Austin," she says casually, looking so prim and proper in her scrubs but there's that look again, that look of defiant wanting in her expression, and he knows then that this isn't over for either of them.

"What?" he manages to say, and she shrugs. 

"Dr Andrews thought it would be useful for me to go with you."

He's properly thrown, wondering what the hell Marcus is playing at. He's the only one in this hospital who definitely shouldn't be encouraging her to go with him on their own to a hotel in Austin, and yet here he is, playing some kind of twisted matchmaker.

It's either a test of his resolve or it's tacit encouragement and he has no idea which it is. 

Subconsciously he licks dry lips, and her keen eyes follow the motion. A tiny betrayal of her thoughts, which she's kept so hidden from him since the night of the gala, and a part of him relaxes. She's no more past this than he is.

"You're okay with that?" he asks, his voice casual as his heart races.

"Why wouldn't I be?" she says, breezy and assured.

He sits back in his chair, arms folded, and quirks an eyebrow at her. She doesn't blush, but a tiny smile crosses her face and she spins around without another word, and he stops thinking about surgical theory and starts thinking about hotel rooms with interconnecting doors. 

He's still sat there hours later with nothing to show for his time except the insistent racing of his blood in his veins and a quiet sense of gathering speed in this uncertain collision course with fate. 

  
5.

They don't travel to the airport together, and he goes through security by himself, which suits him fine.

The first time he sees her is when she's sliding into the seat next to him onboard, a smile that gives nothing away and a murmured "hey" the only acknowledgement he gets. He watches her tip her head back in her seat and close her eyes, and stares down the column of her neck to where her semi-unbuttoned shirt parts over her collarbone. 

Three hours of sitting this close to her suddenly seems like a bad idea.

She glances over at him a short way into the flight and catches him staring, and he doesn't have the will to pretend he's not. He meets her eye steadily and she sits up slightly straighter, a little more tension suddenly visible in the lines of her body as she turns slightly, one of her knees pressing against his in the cramped window seat.

Her eyes drop briefly to his lips and he wonders if she can tell he's holding his breath. 

She smiles just slightly, and she turns her head back to the magazine she's reading, but her thigh remains pressed against his, and it's all he can do not to reach out and run his fingers over the black denim. 

He shuts his eyes and methodically lists the bones in the chest cavity in alphabetical order, and definitely doesn't think about dragging her into the bathroom when the flight attendants aren't looking. 

When they touch down in Austin he's more wound up than ever, and practically leaps out of his seat when the seatbelt lights go off. He sees her hiding a laugh out of the corner of his eye and he shoots her a long suffering look, and he gets his own back by leaning right over her to get their bags down. Her smile fades and her breath fans against the neck of his open collar, infamous antlers just visible over the top. 

He grins at the gleam of smoky defiance in her eyes.

When they check in at the hotel he's not exactly sure if he's relieved or disappointed that her room is safely two floors up from his, but they go their separate ways anyway with a risky promise to meet for dinner. 

They go out to some swanky restaurant in town and he pays, so afterwards she suggests a bar and buys them drinks. It's a bad idea, he thinks, but it's the best kind of bad and turning her down is never even a consideration. 

"Did you come here to get away from me?" she asks casually, while he knocks back a second scotch. He looks at her sidelong and shrugs. 

"Yes."

"Are you sorry I came?"

"No."

She considers him for a second, and then she's up off her barstool and her arms are round his neck and he's got one hand wrapped around his whisky and another wrapped around her and he thinks this just might be the night where he loses his mind for good.

They abandon their drinks after that and get a cab back to the hotel and even in a hotel crawling with surgeons he's got his hand in hers as bold as brass as he pulls her into the elevator and presses her up against the mirrors inside as he kisses her with every ounce of suppressed desire that's been climbing to a fever pitch ever since "I'm your superior".

They're lucky nobody else calls the elevator on their way up because his hand is up the skirt of her black dress and her thigh is wrapped around his and anyone walking in right now would get one hell of a show. But they somehow make it back to his door and he manages to get the lock open on the first try so he can pull her in, one hand already working on the ties behind her neck and his lips demanding against hers. 

And then later when he pins her under him on the bed and has her writhing up against him he finally gets to see the complex green of her eyes lit fiercely with ecstatic, unrestrained passion, and her lips groaning around the vowels of his name. 

If this is what wrong looks like he hopes he never has to be right.

  
6.

He wakes up before her, hours before his alarm, turning his head to see her sleeping on the other side of the bed, her back to him and half covered by the sheet, tangled curls loose and spilling down her back. 

His mind fills with memories of burying his hands in that hair, and her lips battling his for control.

If he couldn't see her right there in front of him, he'd think it was a fever dream.The wild abandon of their complete surrender to each other is still fresh in his mind; if he ever thought she'd be soft in bed he was wrong, and he knows he doesn't mind a bit. 

He feels uniquely worn out, but more satisfied than on any other morning after he can remember, full stop. He struggles momentarily with the temptation to reach out for her, to touch her bare skin and pull her to him for a second time, but he wonders whether that's something he has the right to do. 

A moment of madness, she might think. A one off. 

But his shifting around and deliberating has already stirred her, and she rolls over to look at him through barely-open eyes. 

"I can hear you thinking too hard from here," she mutters, exhaling audibly and then turning her back to him so she can insert herself, her back pressed up against his front and her legs tangled with his. "What are you stressing about?"

"I didn't want you to regret this," he admits. She stills.

"Do you?"

"No," he says, stroking idle patterns down her arm. "But you have more to lose."

She huffs slightly at that, because though it's unfair it's almost certainly true, and he gets a flash of contemplative green as she glances over her shoulder at him. 

"I don't regret it," she says plainly, stubbornly, and he relaxes, dropping his lips to the back of her neck. She shivers and presses her hips back against his.

"Why did Marcus really send you here?" he asks.

"I asked him to let me come."

He digests that for a minute, and he feels her tense under his fingertips, betraying her sudden concern that he will take this revelation badly. It's one thing for her to be sent by chance; it's quite another that she engineered this herself. He contemplates toying with her, just as she has done with him so many times in the past, but quickly decides this is not the moment. 

This is a moment where certain things can be set in stone or thrown to the wind like dust in a hurricane.

"I don't usually like to thank Marcus," he mumbles, moving his lips down her neck to the juncture of her shoulder and applying just enough pressure that he might yet leave a mark. "But I guess I owe him one this time."

Some things are already set in stone.

She relaxes, breathing out as she drags his hand down over her stomach, and presses back against him with an insistence he can hardly ignore.

They wind up being half an hour late for the first session of the conference, and have to slip in to sit in the row at the back, but he thinks a few frowns of disapproval are a small price to pay for the morning he's had. 

And when they sit in the back like a pair of idiot teenagers and her fingers are idly sliding up his thigh because everyone else is busy looking at the surgical diagrams onscreen, he starts to think that maybe some of the talks can be foregone altogether. 

Maybe all of them, if it means he gets to spend the rest of his time with her poised above him, under him, sparkling and triumphant and oh so pleased with herself, her face so beautiful and open and unguarded instead of secretive and restrained. 

It's enough to make him wish, quite sincerely, that they could walk away from it all and forget the reasons why this can't last. 

  
7.

He thought the conference would drag out, just like every other stuffy academic event he's ever been at, but this one goes like lightning.

And as their days go by that flight back to California begins to loom ever closer. 

She knows it too, and when they get back to his room on the last night she seems subdued, and he can't say he blames her.

Her room hasn't been slept in once and he can't remember the last time he was with somebody so many times in such a short space of time. It's been chaotic and perfect and beautiful, and an utter goddamn relief after so many months of wanting her from afar. 

The thought of giving all that up to go back to normality in San Jose is nauseating. 

Back to you can look but you can't touch. 

She's wearing something sleek and elegant in dark red, the last night of the conference ending in fancy drinks that they showed their faces at and then swiftly made an exit, desperate to make the most of their borrowed time. 

She's looking back at him with a strange expression on her face, one that's both soft and hard, caught between tenderness and some kind of simmering anger at the world at large and it's a feeling he thinks he understands. 

Because the thing is, it's never just been about wanting her. 

It's about loving her too, and that's the part that makes this so hard.

If he loves her he will not threaten her career, and he'll do what's right by her. And that means never dragging her into another reputational bloodbath, never encouraging the world to see favouritism in everything she's ever accomplished and sexual favours behind every success. Even if avoiding that cuts at least one heart out of their chests. 

Because he's never been sure if this means love for her too but he knows at least for him the part that comes next is willingly offering up his own heart to be broken again, torn away from the very thing he wants to keep close.

And he thinks she's telling him the same damn story in those dark, lamenting eyes, fixed on his in the half-light of this one final night. 

He kisses her slowly in a way that he hasn't on previous nights. Where it was frenzied, lustful, maddening passion before it's now an agonisingly beautiful slowness, a quiet requiem for the things they've shared and the things they may never get to be. 

He undresses her with a reverence he hasn't had before, drinking in the silken slide of fabric over her skin and taking the time to watch her face with every touch, every butterfly kiss he presses to her throat, her chest, her inner thigh. 

And when he lays her down on the bed she wraps her arms and legs tight around him and her lips part silently against his ear as he makes love to her, undeniably so, and he doesn't say it but the words are on repeat in his head like the final bars of a perfect symphony.

And then her eyes go wide and she's clinging to him, and her lips part in a delicate cry that ends in the words "I love you."

  
8.

He finds out that there's a particular kind of lonely that comes with not being with her. 

He doesn't regret that they took their chance to be with one another in every way they so desperately wanted to be, but he has to admit the aftermath is a hell of a lot more painful than the longing was before. 

Knowing what he's missing really sucks. 

She's back to careful and reserved, never really meeting his eye for longer than she has to. No longer catching him on his own whenever she can for the sole purpose of tormenting him with her proximity like she used to do, and instead she seems to be avoiding him altogether. 

He can understand why. 

It's difficult to forget the way I love you tasted on each other's lips that last night in Texas, and that makes it damn hard to flip back to casual flirtation when they both already know it's so much more. 

He hates that he has to sit back and watch as she becomes always the first to leave a team briefing, the first to volunteer to work with Andrews and Lim, and the first to break eye contact if he ever sees her in the corridor.

He looks for distraction and finds none, because the only thing he's thinking about is her.

He goes out to a bar with Audrey, just for old time's sake. She looks at him sceptically over the rim of her Manhattan and takes a long sip.

"The hell's got into you?" she asks casually. "You look like someone died." 

He swirls his bourbon and eyes her sidelong. 

With Audrey it's never really made a difference that they slept together, he thinks. She came along at the right time, made him realise that there were other people, that there was life, outside what he lost with Jessica. It's part of the reason he was so quick to call it love. But not sleeping with her anymore never left any marks, any scars, the way not being with Claire most definitely has. 

And he knows how telling that is. 

"I'm just tired of being in the wrong place at the wrong time," he says, and knocks back his drink. She looks at him calculatingly, shrugs and doesn't ask further. That's the good thing about her; she never really gets in too deep with him. It's easy and it's familiar and it just doesn't mean that much.

When they leave the bar she looks across at him intently, and he knows immediately that if he asked for it she would give him a night, no strings, no questions, and for a second he is tempted.

But only for that one second, standing there on the pavement in the humid, stifling midnight air, because in the end he knows that going down that road would be like injecting morphine to try and fix a missing limb. 

Pointless, and bound to cause more pain in the long run than it resolves. 

So he bids her goodnight and takes a cab home, his head a little fuzzy and his heart a lot hurt. 

He wishes he would get home and find her waiting on his doorstep, like some kind of cheesy romcom, but life's not like that. His apartment stands empty and he lets himself in with a growing frustration roiling in his belly along with the dull burn of alcohol. 

For the first time in a long time he cracks open a bottle of vintage whisky on his own and drinks more of it than he should, slouched there on his sofa in the dark and waiting for something he knows will never come.

  
9.

His lacklustre performance at work is becoming increasingly obvious. It's not that he's doing a bad job, exactly, but that he's got none of the spark he used to in discussing cases, presenting his ideas. He's making no waves and the silence is felt.

He knows the higher ups must have been talking about him when Andrews sidles over at lunch. He might only be an attending at the moment but he's still got that air of a man in the know, and he's not afraid of getting in other people's business.

"You're messing up your career here," Andrews says, biting into a sandwich with gusto. "Not that that hurts me in any way, but even I don't want to see you go out like this."

"What are you talking about?" he mutters, eyeing Andrews with considerable annoyance over his own untouched lunch.

"I'm talking about Claire," Andrews says bluntly, and even the mention of her name makes him recoil slightly. Andrews cocks an eyebrow. 

"I'm guessing something happened in Austin," he says astutely. "Not that I really doubted it would when she asked to go, but-"

He stares at Andrews warily. "If you knew, then why'd you let her?" he asks, not even really caring that much about the answer now. The damage is already done and it's more for completeness' sake.  
  
Andrews shrugs. "I almost didn't. But I figured it was going to blow up sooner or later. Better to keep the damage contained to another state, if possible."

Neil gives him a look of mingled weariness and annoyance, and Andrews sighs at his lack of fightback in the face of blatant provocation. 

"OK. Believe it or not I'm not trying to be a jerk here. Obviously whatever is going on isn't working for you or Claire, so you need to sort it out."

"What do you mean, for Claire?"

Andrews shoots him a disparaging look. "What, you've been too busy moping around to see how miserable she is too? She's falling behind the other residents." 

"It's kind of hard to see anything when she can't bear to be in the same room as me for more than five minutes," he replies irritably. Andrews pauses, considering. 

"You serious about her?" he asks suddenly, and Neil sits back in his chair, alarm bells ringing. He doesn't really know Andrews' game here and he knows this is like walking on landmines.

But it's hard to lie about something so certain.

"Crazy about her," he mutters, avoiding eye contact, and to his surprise Andrews laughs, hard.

"Never thought I'd see the day," he says, shaking his head. "Neil Melendez, lovesick as a good old fashioned puppy dog."

"Do you have a point here, Marcus?" he grits out, the seething feeling of embarrassment and annoyance bubbling up inside him. 

"Listen, from where I sit, your judgment is already compromised as hell when it comes to Claire. You're in love with her. I don't see what difference it makes if you pretend not to be."

"Are you telling me to... go for it with Claire?" he says incredulously. "Claire. My resident. That Claire."

"I'm saying with how damn useless the pair of you have become lately, it might be in the hospital's interests for you to stop torturing each other," Andrews says pointedly, as he gets up and takes his empty tray. 

"I'm not saying it'll be easy," he adds with a self-satisfied grin. "But is it ever?"

  
10.

He sits in his office later in a state of confusion. 

He'd assumed that there was absolutely nowhere for him to move when it came to Claire and this hospital, that everyone would be united in their condemnation of them both if they dared to pollute that sacred chain of command, but Andrews has already pointed out that the situation isn't that simple.

It's true that his feelings for Claire are already there, and if they're going to cloud his judgment then that's already been happening for months. 

He doesn't think it's affected anything, not when it comes to patient care. They're both pretty damn good at ignoring everything else when they have a case, and he knows he would never hold back from ruthlessly dissecting and weighing up her ideas just as he would with any resident of his. He's also not afraid to shut her down, not least because she'd never expect anything less. 

In fact, she'd be pissed as hell if he ever went soft on her, and he knows better than that. 

He thinks he could make it work. 

He jumps when Audrey walks in, her head down staring at some file she wants him to take a look at, but she glances up and gives him a suspicious look at his uncharacteristic jumpiness. 

"All right," she says, chucking the folder on his desk and folding her arms. "What is with you? You've been acting like a complete weirdo since you got back from Texas, so what gives? I'm asking as your boss or your friend, pick one."

He taps the end of his pen up and down on his desk compulsively, stopping and starting to speak several times.

"It's Claire," he finally mutters. Audrey's expression holds for a minute before shifting into some kind of resigned realisation. 

She shuts the door. 

"Something happened," she says, turning back to him, her tone giving nothing away. "In Austin."

"Yeah," he says hoarsely. He feels like a schoolchild brought up in front of the head.

"Jesus, Neil," she mutters, rubbing her forehead wearily. "So- what, a lapse of judgment and now it's too awkward to work together, is that it?" 

He bristles. "It wasn't a lapse of judgment," he mutters. "This isn't just some fling."

She stares at him intently, and sits down opposite him.

"Isn't?"

He looks at her warily, knowing what she's asking. "Isn't."

"Oh God," Audrey says, rolling her eyes. 

"Yeah," he says. 

And they talk. 

  
11.

He realises, after finally getting a decent night's sleep for the first time since Texas, that he really needs to talk to Claire. 

Not least because in the space of twenty-four hours he's managed to let both of her other superior attendings know about them, and he thinks she's probably going want to know about that. 

He feels stupidly nervous as his finger hovers over her name in his phone during lunch, and he sends her a quick text to ask her to meet him, up on the balcony he's long since got used to thinking of as theirs. 

She makes him wait five minutes before she texts back, and another ten before she actually appears. She looks apprehensive, hands shoved in her pockets and a guarded expression on her face, but she meets his eye squarely as she draws up next to him, a careful distance between their bodies. 

"Hey," she says, and he longs to just cross that last bit of empty space but he holds himself back, offering a tentative smile as he looks over at her. 

She's tired, he realises. The spark is subdued, like grey clouds over blue sky in June. 

"I..." he stops, wondering how to start this without it sounding ridiculous, and decides, brashly, to jump right in. "Lim and Andrews know something happened in Texas," he says awkwardly. 

Her eyebrows go up. 

"You told them."

"I didn't really have to," he admits. "I haven't exactly been kicking goals lately. They knew something was up."

She watches him silently, her expression unchanging, though he thinks he can see a flicker of nervous energy under that collected exterior. 

"Are they pissed?" she asks, as casually as if she were asking about the weather. 

"No," he says. "Not with you."

"With you?"

"They just think I'm an idiot," he says, shaking his head slightly. "But they were... Claire, the last few weeks have been shit," he says suddenly, no longer caring about making this sound like a scripted movie and just desperate to make her understand that for him, they're well beyond waiting for a better time to make this work. 

It's got to be now. 

He takes a step closer to her so they're almost touching, watches as her breathing catches and her eyes dart between his, so unsure, but still holding that same look she had the last time he kissed her.

"I love you," he says, his heart pounding and his fingers shaking with the urge to touch her. "But it's up to you," he adds, his eyes locked on hers as at last he can't stop himself and presses his hand to her cheek. "It's always been up to you." 

She searches him, solemn-eyed and beautiful, no pretence or games as she weighs up the full measure of him, and then at last, at long last, she smiles up at him, and it's like starlight in the midnight sky. 

"I love you too."

12.

"So how'd they take it?"

He wonders not for the first time whether Marcus Andrews has some kind of tracking device on him. 

He rolls his eyes and moves his coat so Andrews can sit down opposite him, and studies him for a moment. 

"It's the second time in two years that I've been in HR reporting a relationship with a colleague," he says. "How d'you think?"

Andrews snorts. "Leaving aside the obvious implication that you need to widen your social circle to outside this hospital, I'm assuming they didn't actually oppose it?"

"No," he admits, and for a second he can't conceal his reluctant smile. "They didn't."

Andrews looks irritatingly smug.

"You can thank me later. I want naming rights over your firstborn."

Neil rolls his eyes as Andrews gets up, and then glances back at him. "Hey Marcus," he says, and Andrews turns. "Thanks."

Andrews laughs to himself again and walks away, shaking his head. 

And Neil sits and reflects on this unexpected turn of fate.

A week ago he thought he would never so much as share an honest moment with Claire again; today, he's had the hospital sign off on a bona fide relationship with her. 

It's terrifying. 

He's not supervising her anymore, unless there's another attending on the case too, and that part is a shame. He knows he's good for her from a career perspective, knows that nobody is better placed to bring out her best in the OR than he is. And truthfully, he's never had a resident who suits him as well as she does in there either.

But there are other ways he can support her, and any loss to him is more than compensated by what it feels like to actually be able to say that he's dating Claire Browne and there's nothing to hide anymore. 

He can legitimately stop her in the corridor and flirt with her openly, like a pair of high schoolers after a first date. 

Of course, that's not to say that he actually _should_ do that, or that he ever would. In fact, he feels pretty awkward about the whole situation, and he tries not to give anything away if he ever encounters her and anybody else is in the room. To the point where he starts to think that he's now being even weirder than if he wasn't trying not to be inappropriate, which is just great.

His head is starting to hurt. 

"Would you just relax?" she says incredulously, once Park has fled the room after giving Neil a series of strange looks for his oddly aloof behaviour. "You're acting like you've just abducted a child and robbed a bank on the same night."

"Sorry," he mutters, dropping into the couch opposite her and rubbing his forehead. She's got a bunch of neurosurgical articles around her and she's writing out a page of scribbled notes, and she's seemingly adapting to the new order of things with a lot more elegance than he is. 

"We are allowed to talk to each other," she says distractedly, holding up a diagram in front of her face and rotating it slowly. "It's not like we're about to get up and have sex on your desk."

She catches his eye then and he tilts his head, his expression deliberately suggestive. She rolls her eyes and suppresses a smile.

"Point is, you need to act like a normal human being, or people are going to think something even weirder is going on than it already is."

She gets to her feet and comes around the back of the sofa he's sat on, leaning down and putting one arm around his chest from behind. She kisses his cheek softly, and he sighs.

"See? Was that so hard?" she says, swatting at the back of his head suddenly with one of her papers. "Now come on, let's go back to your place. I'm about done here."

"You're the boss," he says, getting to his feet and she laughs. 

"About time," she says, and puts her hand in his.

It's going to take some figuring out, he thinks, but as he holds her hand walking through the parking lot before they get into the same damn car, he's pretty happy with how things have turned out. 

Because now, when he looks in those green eyes, all he sees is the rest of his life. 


End file.
